All posts tagged: Poetry

2018 Notifications

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Image: Beate Meier It’s our fourth annual notifications post! Below, you’ll find information about creative writing acceptance, rejection and waitlist notifications; MA and low-res programs are included. We collect this information from Gradcafe. We cannot guarantee the data is 100 percent accurate as it is user submitted and unverifiable. Please let us know if a program is still notifying applicants, or if anything is inaccurate. Where did you apply? Have you heard back from programs? Share below and good luck! ***** Updated 3/13/18 10:49 PM Programs that have notified so far according to GradCafe results. This does not necessarily mean they are done notifying. Programs are listed in alphabetical order. Fiction Adelphi University: acceptance via email. University of Alabama: all notifications sent. University of Alaska, Fairbanks: acceptances via email and phone. American University: acceptances via email. Antioch Los Angeles: acceptance via phone. Arcadia University: acceptance via email. University of Arizona: all notifications sent. Bard College: rejection via email. Bennington College: acceptance via phone. Brooklyn College: acceptances via phone. Brown University: all notifications sent. Boise State University: acceptance …

On Writing When You’d Rather Not

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Reflecting on the first semester of my MFA program at UVA, I’m struck by how lovely, how dreamy it’s been. I had various worries about beginning the program, but none of them ended up being confirmed: except one, maybe, just a little bit. I worried that it would be harder to write once writing (good, successful) poems became my main responsibility. This is both true and not true: on the one hand, writing is easier because I’m doing it more often, and because it’s hard not to feel inspired when I’m surrounded by such astonishingly talented people. Most of the time, writing is what I want to do. On the other hand, the point of an MFA program is that you must write regularly, even if inspiration doesn’t arrive. You have to hand work in to a group of people you earnestly want to impress, and are not certain of impressing. I’m not always in the mood. It is different to have to do something, and that fact sometimes triggers an impulse to procrastinate. While …

Surviving Grad School & the “Me too” Campaign & Weinstein & Literally Everything Else

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Image Credit: torbakhopper cw: sexual assault After the countless hours I spent last year on sexual assault prevention techniques and safe/consensual sex seminars, I felt confident in my victimhood. For me, fighting against the systemic powers that reinforce toxic masculinity has changed the way I see my place in it all. From being a struggling, suicidal victim of sexual assault in my undergraduate years to my time as a workshop leader in “Writing Survival,” I have gotten to know myself as someone who is healing through helping. That is, until this year, until my first semester in graduate school. At first, I was sure that most of my stress was coming from the twenty-five-page paper or the in-class discussions where I always feel like a prick, or even living so far from East Tennessee, but it became a bit more apparent over time that maybe I wasn’t only reacting to natural stressors. I found myself—and still do regularly—falling into deep depressions for weeks at a time, holding onto what little reality I could, usually in …

On Reading Poetry and Poetry Readings

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Do you read poetry out loud or in your head? Do you read so slowly you lose interest or so quickly you have motions sickness by the end of the poem? Is it okay to space-out during a reading? Are boredom and confusion acceptable experiences to have when, say, you read a poem that doesn’t stick, that slides right off your mind back onto the page? This semester, in Lisa Olstein’s seminar class on sixties poets, we’ve been reading a poetry collection weekly and discussing the effects they have on us as readers. Two poets we’ve read recently have taught me one thing: No one can tell you how to have an experience. My gratitude for this lesson goes out to John Ashbery and W.S. Merwin, and to their books, Rivers and Mountains and The Lice. Ashbery is notoriously difficult and polarizing in certain ways—a divide usually opening up between “I don’t get it” or “I don’t get why it matters.” I’ve loved Ashbery for years but also always felt myself space-out during his longer …

At What Point is Self-Care Toxic?

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Image: Photo by Abby Breaking News: I figured out that graduate school is hard. At the point when this happened, I was facing around eleven of my classmates. I was to present an essay we read in my Contemporary African Lit. class. I had read this article maybe five times before I had a speech ready, and I was going to do this. But there was a block, and I started stumbling, and I turned red, and people jumped in to help me, and I was spiraling. Two people gave presentations after and killed it, too, so when I left I was ready to go home and eat leftovers and cry. As my friend drove me home I expressed how humiliated I had looked, and she promised it would get better. In fact, everyone has said that the first semester is very hard. They say: The first semester of graduate school is the hardest, and that’s not to say it gets easier. It doesn’t. You’ll just adjust to how difficult it is. So here I was, …

I Am Not My Personal Statement

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Image: Lidyanne Aquino While I was applying to MFA poetry programs in late 2016- early 2017, I was simultaneously figuring out how to come out as non-binary. I was writing personal letters, bios, anything that described me, and they were slowly morphing into queer testimonies. I found that I was taking the application process a little too seriously, a little too defensively. I was refreshing my Gmail App almost every thirty minutes. I was butterflied, I felt, by the interrogation of personal statements and essay responses. I was trying to impress someone, and I was trying to be myself, and I didn’t believe myself. The University of Mississippi’s Derrick Harriell called me to offer me a TAship in his program. I wanted to say, “Are you sure? I’m not my personal statement.” In fact, each school that accepted me got a version of Jennie on the phone who I can’t defend. I was scared and guilty of having changed dramatically since I sent my personal statement. Yeah, sure, my resume hadn’t changed, and sure, my …

Uprooting

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I’m lying on my couch, an air mattress, adjusting my elbows, which every few minutes scrub a crumb—probably KIND-brand cinnamon oat cluster granola. I was accepted into the Michener Center for Writers (after being accidentally rejected) in March and moved to Austin on August 9th, floating around for a month before landing a spacious apartment close to campus. But, in Austin, unless you want to live in one of those industrial, small-town-sized apartment complexes (you know, with a pool and visitor parking that’s never open anyway) you’re getting an unfurnished spot, and now that I have a real bed and felt too lazy to deflate this mattress, which was eight dollars at Wal-Mart, I have a couch, too. I was born in Puerto Rico and raised, mostly, in Orlando, Florida. My family is pretty much all Nuyorican, and the other side is all Cuban, all living in Miami since 1966, when they won “the lottery”—which is not 300 million dollars taxed at 82% but more like a get-out-of-Cuba-free card. But that was a long time …